(Mechelen 1616–1681)
Diana resting, with her hunting dogs and putti,
oil on canvas, 143.5 x 182 cm, framed

With a wax seal and inscribed on the reverse: Roma, Collezione di mo(nsignore) Alessandro Del Magno, no. 37

Provenance:
Collection Monsignore Giovanni Alessandro Del Magno, Dean of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, Dicastery of the Roman curia (according to the inscription on the reverse);
possibly his sale, Rome, 1841 (see the article in: Kunstblatt, 1841, Stuttgart/Tubingen, no. 60, 29 July 1841, p. 256)

The present painting can be compared to Lucas Franchoys’s Venus and Adonis in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (see M. Chiarini et al., La Galleria Palatina e gli appartamenti reali di Palazzo Pitti, Catalogo dei Dipinti, Florence 2003, vol. II, no. 287). In addition to thematic, stylistic and compositional similarities, the putto at the feet of Diana is almost identical to the one at the feet of Venus in the Florence painting. The very prominent position of the dog next to Diana is striking. The goddess holds his paw, and the animal looks directly at the viewer.

Lucas Franchoys the Younger is one of the few significant seventeenth-century painters from Mechelen in Flanders. He received his artistic training from his father, Lucas Franchoys the Elder. According to an early biographer, Cornelis de Bie, Franchoys entered the studio of Peter Paul Rubens in the late 1630s in Antwerp. As is apparent in the present painting, he became one of the most talented of Rubens’s followers. After Rubens’s death in 1640, Franchoys may have spent some time working in Paris for the Prince de Condé, although no firm evidence of such a trip survives. His first recorded commissions were received around the end of the 1640s, for various churches and monasteries in Tournai. Franchoys had returned to Mechelen by 1654. He worked there until his death, establishing a successful workshop. His most important patron was Alphonse de Bergues, the future Archbishop of Mechelen, who commissioned several works from the artist for local churches. Best known as a portrait and history painter, Franchoys was registered in the artist’s guild in Mechelen in 1655 and served as dean of the guild in 1663.